How multi-hyphenate designer Alexander Girard made America modern On September 21, 1967, First Lady Lady Bird Johnson visited Columbus, Indiana. The architects of the town?s famous modern architecture program lined up to greet her outside Gunnar Birkerts?s Lincoln Elementary School (1967), leaning on the concrete bollards designed to channel the schoolchildren up the wide concrete stairs and into the body of the school.
John Dinkeloo, Dan Kiley, Robert Venturi, I.M. Pei, Harry Weese, John Carl Warnecke, Birkerts. But over on the far right, clasping hands with Pei and almost out of frame, is Alexander Girard. That?s where he liked to be.
Designer Alexander Girard was also an architect?though most don?t know him as such?and a key player in making America look and feel modern. Today he is best known for the fabrics he designed as director of the Herman Miller Textile Division between 1952 and 1973, which included everything from colorful stripes to eye-crossing checkers, cut-out flowers to a hand-drawn alphabet. But to peg him solely as a textile designer (though there?s nothing wrong with being a textile designer) is to severely underestimate his accomplishments. Even within the textile division, he designed furniture and wallpaper, as well as ?Environmental Enrichment Panels? that were intended to free the cubicle-lined corporate office from terminal beigeness.
The sprawling career retrospective, organized by the Vitra Museum, opened at the Cranbrook Museum of Art in...